1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data processing system and, in particular, to a method, apparatus, and program for providing access decision information.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is a network of networks, made up of computers in many countries covering commercial, academic and government endeavors. Originally developed for the U.S. military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a large variety of subjects. However, today the Internet has become commercialized into a worldwide information superhighway, providing information on every subject known to humankind.
A client/server architecture is an architecture in which the user's computer, the client, is the requesting machine and the server is the supplying machine. The client and server are both connected via a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet. In client/server environment, the client processes the user interface and can perform some or all of the application processing. Servers range in capacity from high-end personal computers to mainframes.
An example of a client/server environment is the World Wide Web (WWW), which is an Internet service that links documents locally and remotely. Documents are stored on the Internet in “Web servers” that store and disseminate Web pages in hypertext markup language (HTML) to Web browsers at the clients. The Web page, or Web document, contains text, graphics, animations and videos as well as hypertext links. Hypertext links in a Web page let users jump from page to page, whether the pages are stored on the same server or on servers around the world. The Web has also turned into an online shopping mall as almost every organization has added electronic commerce (e-commerce) capabilities.
In many cases, a computer, such as a Web server with e-commerce capabilities, must make informed user specific decisions based on entitlement data. For example, a Web site may perform age verification using driver's license information before selling an R-rated movie. This entitlement data may be stored in distributed heterogeneous information systems.
Currently, the only way for this entitlement data to be leveraged is through proprietary and/or disparate programming interfaces. A disadvantage of this approach is that in order for each application in the system to have access to the required attributes, each application must perform its own discovery of the entitlement data. This is especially inefficient for the case where multiple operations may be performed by different applications on the same piece of data. Furthermore, this requires a large amount of custom development on the part of the application developer, because each application must include an interface for each entitlement information provider.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a single solution for retrieving and handling user specific attribute information from various providers.